conversation which ensued. There was a
clenching of his fist, a shutting together of his teeth, and an impulse
to knock the boasting Frank Van Buren down; and then, as the past
flashed before him, with the thought that possibly Frank spoke the truth
and Ethelyn had loved him, there swept over him such a sense of anguish
and desolation that he forgot all else in his own wretchedness. It had
never occurred to him that Ethelyn married him while all the time she
loved another--that perhaps she loved that other still--and the very
possibility of it drove him nearly wild.

He was missed from the party, but no one could tell when he left, for no
one saw him as he sprang down into the garden, and taking refuge in the
paths where the shades were the deepest, escaped unobserved into the
street, and so back to his own room, where he went over all the past
and recalled every little act of affection on Ethelyn's part, weighed it
in the balance with proofs that she did not care for him and never had.
So much did Richard love his wife and so anxious was he to find her
guiltless that he magnified every virtue and excused every error until
the verdict rendered was in her favor, and Frank alone was the
delinquent--Frank, the vain, conceited coxcomb, who thought because a
woman was civil to him that she must needs wish to marry him; Frank, the
wretch who had presumed to pity his cousin, and called her husband a
clown! How Richard's fingers tingled with a desire to thrash the
insulting rascal; and how, in spite of the verdict, his heart ached with
a dull, heavy fear lest it might be true in part, that Ethie had once
felt for Frank something deeper than what girls usually feel for their
first cousins.

"And supposing she has?" Richard's generous nature asked. "Supposing she
did love this Frank once on a time well enough to marry him? She surely
was all over that love before she promised to be my wife, else she had
not promised; and so the only point where she is at fault was in
concealing from me the fact that she had loved another first. I was
honest with her. I told her of Abigail, and it was very hard to do it,
for I felt that the proud girl's spirit rebelled against such as Abigail
was years ago. It would have been so easy, then, for Ethelyn to have
confessed to me, if she had a confession to make; though how she could
ever care for such a jackanapes as that baboon of a Frank is more than I
can tell."

Richard was waxing warm against